Lambert, Gavin, "Janet Gaynor and Adrian: Nominee for
A Star is Born
and Her Costume Designer Husband," in
Architectural Digest
(Los Angeles), April 1992.

"The Janet Gaynor Project," in
Journal of Film Preservation
(Brussels), November 1995.

* * *

In
Movies in the Age of Innocence
, Edward Wagenknecht writes, "It would be hard to say whether Janet
Gaynor is better remembered for her silent or her sound films, but her
spirit was that of the silent years, and nobody could possibly have ended
them more pleasantly." Gaynor did star for slightly longer in
talkies than she did in silent features, but her characterizations were
quite definitely formed during the earlier period; she was sweet and
sentimental as only a silent ingenue could be, and was a perfect type for
Depression-era audiences. She embodied cuteness, but it was never cloying
or offensive. Perhaps appropriately, her last screen appearance (after
many years of retirement) was in
Bernardine
, which starred the 1950s idea of cuteness in the form of Pat Boone.

Gaynor's persona suggested the child-woman image which Mary
Pickford had created, and, indeed, Janet Gaynor remade two of
Pickford's silent features as talkies:
Daddy Long Legs
and
Tess of the Storm Country
. Yet Gaynor's characters were a little more sophisticated than
Pickford's, a little more worldly-wise. As the director Victor
Schertzinger once commented, "She has the maturity of the ages, and
yet is singularly youthful."

Under Murnau's direction in
Sunrise
, Gaynor is subdued, very much the German Hausfrau, with a blond wig
complementing the harsh makeup she wears. This is perhaps the most
untypical Gaynor performance in that Murnau gives the majority of the
emotional scenes to her leading man, George O'Brien. The same is
not true of Gaynor's films for Frank Borzage,
Seventh Heaven
and
Street Angel
, in which the actress is given free rein for her emotional outbursts.

In
Seventh Heaven
she reaches the height of happiness in the symbolic wedding sequence with
Charles Farrell, and the peak of angry emotion as she takes a whip to
Gladys Brockwell, running her out of the home she and Farrell have created
for themselves. Both
Seventh Heaven
and
Street Angel
illustrate the range of Gaynor's acting ability; in both she grows
from a weak, frightened, disillusioned girl into a woman who knows love
and experiences an inner strength.

Another key Gaynor-Farrell teaming came in the touching and at times
profound part-talkie melodrama,
Lucky Star
, which was rediscovered and theatrically rereleased in the early 1990s.
She plays a poor drudge who loves Farrell, who has been paralyzed from the
waist down during the war. Gaynor brings to the role a freshness, a
hopeful quality in the face of adversity.

Gaynor's first all-talkie,
Sunny Side Up
, is delightful for its songs—"If I Had a Talking Picture of
You," "I'm a Dreamer," and the title
number—but it is also embarrassing because of the babylike voices
emanating from its stars, Gaynor and Farrell. That they were featured
together in seven more films is extraordinary, but that Gaynor and Farrell
managed to remain so overpoweringly popular is even more remarkable. In
fact, Janet Gaynor settled into a comfortable niche as a talkie star. Who
else, for example, could have played Will Rogers's daughter in
State Fair
? The actress's last great screen role was as Esther Blodgett in
the first version of
A Star Is Born
, and it is curious that she should portray an actress reaching the
pinnacle of her fame just as her own career was reaching its end.

—Anthony Slide, updated by Audrey E. Kupferberg

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: